NASA 'On The Cusp' Of Discovering If Life Exists Beyond Earth, Says Top Scientist
Source: Huffington Post
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WASHINGTON -- There's evidence of an interior ocean on Pluto. One of Jupiter's moons has a global ocean beneath its crust that could contain more than twice as much water as Earth. There are at least half a dozen of these ocean worlds in our solar system alone -- and where there's water, there may be answers about the potential for life across the universe.
That's what a panel of planetary scientists told the House Science, Space and Technology Committee Tuesday, and left everyone's minds blown.
"Are we alone? Many, many people on planet Earth want to know," said Dr. John Grunsfeld, a physicist and former astronaut who now leads NASA's Science Mission Directorate. "We are on the cusp of being able to answer that question … because of the investments we're making in space technology."
Grunsfeld joined four other panelists in urging lawmakers to keep up federal funding for space exploration. They all described exciting new developments, but one didn't need much explaining: Earlier this month, the NASA space probe New Horizons completed its historic flyby of Pluto. NASA has received only a tiny amount of data back so far -- it's going to take 16 months to get it all, as it travels across 3 billion miles of space -- but there have already been surprising discoveries.
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/nasa-life-beyond-earth_55b7ad53e4b0a13f9d1a4f97?
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The search for E.T. The new research suggests that Enceladus has three main ingredients needed for life to evolve: water, heat, and nutrients. Just last year, scientists mapped out 101 geysers of water vapor and ice near Enceladus's south pole.
Plumes spurting ice particles, water vapor and trace organic compounds from the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Nasa/JPL/Space Science Institute
And given that the moon isn't the only one of its kind, this has intriguing implications for the possibility of life elsewhere in the Milky Way.
“Enceladus may even represent a very common habitat in the galaxy: icy moons around giant gas planets, located well beyond the ‘habitable zone’ of a star, but still able to maintain liquid water below their icy surface,” Nicolas Altobelli, a Cassini project scientist, said in a written statement issued by the European Space Agency.
Researchers are eager to examine samples from Enceladus to determine whether life exists there, though that may take years.
"It will take more than 20 years to send a space probe to Enceladus and bring samples back to Earth," Dr. Yasuhito Sekine, an associate professor at the University of Tokyo and one of the researchers behind the new finding, told Reuters.
"So we're taking a long breath until we finally get the sample in our hands -- maybe more than 30 years -- but hopefully by the end of this century, we will reach the conclusion."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/12/saturn-moon-ocean-enceladus-hot-springs_n_6857150.html
Five or ten years ago I saw reports that viruses -- basically raw DNA or RNA usually in a protein shell rather than a candy shell like M&Ms) -- have been synthesized from a nucleotide sequence data. I discussed this with a virologist at a party and we both had the same reaction, namely, oh shite.
Meanwhile, counts you see for galaxies typically refer to the observable universe, the fraction of the universe that was at some point near enough for its light to have had time to reach us since the Big Bang a little under 14 billion years ago. Or really, since the phase change that made the universe transparent, which is the source of the cosmic microwave background.
But its very likely that the universe is a lot bigger than that. A whole lot. In fact, space appears to be Euclidean (or "flat"
on a cosmic scale, and the simplest geometry consistent with that is that space is infinite, and since basic Big Bang model implies that matter is approximately evenly distributed throughout all space, the number of galaxies is likewise probably infinite. (Stephen Hawking alluded to this in passing in the recent announcement of a $100 billion donation from a Russian billionaire to fund ten years of vastly expanded search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.)
I read an article in SCIENCE some years back discussing the implications of an infinite universe. Anything that can possibly exist, no matter how unlikely, almost certainly does exist somewhere.
(John Oliver asked Stephen Hawking about this in an interview, and in particular wanted to know whether this meant that on some parallel Earth he was dating Charlize Theron. Hawking told him no.)
Unfortunately, or fortunately if you think about such possibilities as the Tea Party Borg, all the observable universe, and even a good chunk of the observable universe, will forever be beyond our ability to examine except at best for observing it in the remote past. The more distant galaxies we can are receding from us faster than the speed of light and were doing so even when the light we see left them. (It's seriously hard to get one's mind around this, but it's true. I've read and even understood a tiny bit of a paper on this, and you can find a video about it on the Veritasium YouTube channel.) So barring faster-than-light communication or travel we can never emprically verify that the universe is infinite, even though the math suggests it is.
A large space mirror heats up an asteroid, slowly melting it. Water, which was injected into the center of the body expands, blows up the melted material, creating the shape of a balloon. After cooling down, rotation is induced into the hollow body creating artificial gravity.
A team of bio-life-support system experts, urban planners, and ecologists starts to create an artificial world inside the balloon, preparing it for the first settlers. The small world is then provided with a propulsion system and launched to one of the next stars or used as a space colony.
http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/project-hyperion-the-hollow-asteroid-starship-dissemination-of-an-idea/
